Let’s see now. Blue cotton top:
Progressing. I think I’m on my fifth ball of the cotton. I’m not sure. As you can see, I stopped the ribbing just under the bust and am putting in some short rows. It fits nicely!
Also, you can buy the Sweet Cocoa Cloche pattern here!
Aaaand the pattern for the Macaw hand puppet is sort of coming along.
In other news, Ravelry is fun!
My friend Bezzie recently wrote on her feelings about bandwagons. (She’s against them.) I used to have that sort of clear-cut opinion on them, too. In fact, I had the same one. That would kind of put us on the same anti-bandwagon bandwagon, wouldn’t it? The ironic thing about being anti-bandwagon is that there are a lot of other people who feel the same way. I think that when you base your behavior on what other people are doing or not doing – even if it’s to do the opposite – you’re moving with the herd. Even if your herd is the anti-herd, composed entirely of black sheep. Then the black sheep isn’t unusual, is it? It’s surrounded by other black sheep.
Not (just to clarify) that I think Bezzie is an anti-herd sheep. I haven’t noticed flocks of other knitters making plastic bag raincoats or skirts out of business cards or knitting their own action figures. But. Given the topic of her musing and my own previous anti-herd sheepiness it’s almost embarassing to announce that I got my Ravelry invite last night.
Of course, my new approach to things is not to judge something new on what others think of it, but on my own perception of its merits. Sometimes this means doing something that a lot of other people are doing, other times it means doing something no one else is. I think that’s the healthy variance known as ‘personality.’ I wasn’t aware of the hype surrounding Ravelry until recently (I think it started as more of a knitting community thing). I read about it on Kim’s Crochetme blog and it sounded cool. Do I get points for doing the same thing as everybody else for a different reason? Ah, well. If you’re already in Ravelry, too, you can be my friend. 
So. As I mentioned, we’re moving to Japan. If you’re puzzled or shocked by that, perhaps this will help clear it up: Greg is in the military. Aaaaaah. Yup, that’s why. We’re really, really excited. We’re supposed to go in February, which seems like ages away, although I know that it’s really a short time to prepare for and execute a transoceanic move. We have to sell our car. (Well, we don’t have to, but if we don’t we’ll be shelling out some $$$ to bring it up to code. So we’re going to sell it and buy another one over there.) We have to sell our house. We need to sell Greg’s motorcycle. (Same deal as the car.) Greg was actually in a low speed motorcycle/car crash a few days ago, so we no longer have to sell 2 bikes. (Greg is doing very well, his worst injury consists of 2 bones broken in his left hand. We have been very, very busy since then.)
We got the Rosetta Stone program to begin learning Japanese. It’s fun, it’s not that hard, and we hope to be intelligible by the time we have to be in the country. We’ve spoken to some people who used the same program and they said that it’s a good program but it didn’t give them the basic conversational Japanese they needed to get started. I can see that, but it gives such a good base of grammar and vocabulary that I’m going to keep using it. Traveler’s phrasebooks cover that other stuff.
I had a really interesting experience yesterday, though: Max’s speech therapist came over for our session. We had the following conversation:
Me: “Oh, and we got orders this week – we’re moving to Japan!”
Her: *gigantic gasp, shocked facial expression* *double take* “…You’re smiling?”
“Yeah, we’re really excited about it!”
“Wow. That’s so far away!”
“Yup. Yup, we’ve been reading everything we can get our hands on about it though, and talking to people. We even got this program and we’re starting to learn Japanese!”
“Japanese, that’s just a series of grunts, right?”
Pause. “What?”
“Yeah, Japanese, that’s just -” (lowering her voice) “grunting?”
“Um. Noooooo, I wouldn’t really call it grunting.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, it’s kind of percussive, I guess, because they’ve got the consonant – vowel – consonant – vowel sound pattern, but I don’t think you could call it grunting.”
“Oh. Well, I haven’t really had any experience with it.”
“Mmmhmmm…”
So that was interesting. She’s an educated person! But it turns out that she’s only been out of The Great State of Texas 3 times (once when she was 4 years old) and her world doesn’t extend much past its borders. (I made a comment about how long it takes to travel through Texas and she responded by saying, “Yeah, I’ve heard that once you get outside it goes really fast, like from state to state?” That one I could confirm for her. I have to wonder what she would think of, say, Iowa. Or Vermont!)
Crafty content coming up. We’ve just been insanely busy with other things.